New Substantive Revision to the SEP Entry on the Epistemology of Modality

 Here.

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Essential Properties and Possible Worlds

Kit Fine famously argued for the inadequacy of possible-worlds analysis of essence. Below is a related criticism of my own.  Call the phenomenon of a bearer having a property in all of the worlds it occupies, ‘rigid exemplification’.  What’s the relationship between essential properties and rigid exemplification? On the standard possible-worlds account, the latter constitutes an analysis of the former: the right-hand side gives a list of the constituents of the item expressed on the left-hand side: (EPdef) F is an essential property of x =def.  x has F in all (metaphysically) possible worlds in which x exists. A slightly weaker account of the relationship has it that while the latter isn’t an analysis of the constituents of the former, the latter and the former are yet necessarily co-extensive : (EPiff) Necessarily, F is an essential property of x if, and only if, x has F in all (metaphysically) possible worlds in which x exists. I worry that EPdef and EPiff are both fals...
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Descartes' Modal Epistemology

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Yablo's "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

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